Cinema Session #2: Ruderalia

Film screening and walk with Joris De Rycke
Thursday, 26 June 2025, from 19:00-21:00

As part of the Forest Encounters exhibition, Out of Sight and MORPHO invite you to Cinema Sessions #2, an annual collaboration between the two organisations. Join us on Thursday, 26 June for Ruderalia — a film screening and guided walk through the neighbourhood with artist and filmmaker Joris De Rycke.

In Ruderalia, De Rycke subverts the familiar language of nature documentaries. He rejects the spectacular — no high-definition close-ups, dramatic soundtracks, or authoritative voice-overs. Instead, with quiet attentiveness and without embellishment, he turns his gaze toward, what he calls ‘banal’ nature found on the margins of highways, industrial zones, quarries, and slag heaps, places we rarely consider worthy of our attention.

Ruderalia becomes a compelling guided walk through the overlooked wilderness of Belgium, far from marked trails, information boards, or curated landscapes. It leads us across disturbed grounds and post-industrial sites, what the Latin root ruder (meaning ‘rubble’ or ‘waste’) alludes to, where nature emerges not as untouched or pure, but as an artefact shaped by past events and recent human activities. Here, plants become storytellers, revealing the chemical composition of the soil and the work of pollinators fostering hybrid species. De Rycke demonstrates that another kind of nature documentary is possible, one that is slow, grounded, and deeply reflective.

Following the screening, Joris De Rycke invites the audience to join him on a walk through the immediate surroundings of our organisations. This shared walk extends the film experience into real life, moving further away from spectacle and deeper into the layered, entangled nature that we are part of today.

Credits: Film by Joris De Rycke / Production: Kunstenplatform plan B / Sound recordings: Joris De Rycke, Gerard Herman, Hanne Geerinckx / Soundtrack: Jo Caimo, Jonathan Tetteh, Joris De Rycke, Gerard Herman, Ignace De Bruyn / Realised with the support of Flanders —  State of the Art

The Forest Encounters exhibition and parallel programme are part of the Forest Encounters project (2023–2025), co-funded by the European Union, Flanders – State of the Art, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Brussels. // Partner organisations: Association Igor Zabel for Culture and Theory (Slovenia), Graz University of Technology – Faculty of Architecture, Institute of Spatial Design (Austria), Out of Sight (Belgium).

Ruderalia (2023) — Joris De Rycke / Film still, Courtesy of the artist
Ruderalia (2023) — Joris De Rycke / Film still, Courtesy of the artist
Ruderalia (2023) — Joris De Rycke / Film still, Courtesy of the artist